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Jason Feffer, Founder of MySpace, SodaHead
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MySpace word of mouth worked like coercion by friends/peers
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Wikipedia def. of viral: bad product or service gets better multiplier (11x) than good product or service (3x)
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Spent a lot of time deleting content, removing porn
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"MySpace is the best UI in the world." lol (: Result of sticking to roots in L.A., rather than moving to NoCal?
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Bad experiences to avoid:
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Unwanted attention re: pedophiles on MySpace - stories were almost all untrue
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original minimum age was 18 - lots of underage signups
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fake profiles of school principles
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Good experiences to seek:
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Gave tools to become exhibitionists - One good "exhibitionist" gets 5k-10k "voyuers"
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then sharing music paved the way for people to brand themselves
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Control your brand - MySpace was a media company, not a technology company Focused on being an entertainment company, working with fasion and entertainment pubs
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"buddylube" - connects widget companies with viral marketing campaigns
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Where opinions meet - "Best polling widget on the planet. We're proving it every day."
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MySpace widget, Facebook api
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Lessons from MySpace/ What works/doesn't work:
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some people don't know Copy/Paste. I.e., know your users' skills
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recruited/helped B-grade/demi celebrities
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Lots of fake profiles. Some were allowed, some were not. Fun, obviously fake were allowed, e.g., Jesus
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"Definetely figure out who your target audience is. Start out an inch wide and a mile deep."
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Rocking the Widget World
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Jia Shen, RockYou
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Self expression with widgets
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450K widgets created per day
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Do a lot of user studies - interview users, rev s/w, go back and interview again, use WebEx
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added 9M users in last 1.5 months, since launching on Facebook
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Ben Pashman, Gigya
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B2B Widget distribution, services for widgets
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200 partners live, 300 more signed up
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David Weekly, PBwiki
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David wrote a "single status" widget to alert when someone's relationship status changed to single on MySpace. 10 days later he got a cease and desist from MySpace.
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PBwiki was not originally targetted for teachers, but but they found it useful and started presenting it at conferences. PBwiki fostered that by supplying presentation and marketing materials.
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Employ your users - recognize their efforts with Tshirts and acknowledgements
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Online Communities - To A Million and Beyond [panel]
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David Feinleib, MDV
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David, Panel Moderator, asks, What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?
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Joe Geenstein, Flixster
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Flixster is 9 employees
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Joe's greatest failure: market place for questions and answer
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Ramu Yalamanchi, hi5
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raised $250K for initial funding and stretched it - founders took no salary
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Jonathan Ambrams, Socializr
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Jonathan's First company was Hotlinks, then founded Friendster
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Advice: Get features out as fast as possible, but with quality in case it takes off
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Jim Squires, Ning
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Focused on the network creators
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Advice: Test new ideas quickly, and expect the unexpected, including that some features will not take off
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Too much traffic to handle - crashing site is a good problem to have
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15% of 1.4B online users are using social networking
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Biggest problem has been spam, unwanted load crashing networks
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Ning Platform is open - as a user, you own the code and content
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Metrics - Measuring Viral Campaigns [panel]
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Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed
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3 key leading indicators
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How big is your base
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How visible is the meme?
- How long will meme live?
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Facebook is:
- Communication
- Self expression
- Utility
- Communication
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There is no magic set of metrics.
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Make sure you really understand the process - what's the goal, e.g., clickthrough, new members. Process flows are critical.
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"The dirty little secret, viral marketing, is not dirty, not little, not a secret."
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Adam Rifkin, Boozemail
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Growing 30% per day
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Clint Smith, Emma
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Do things that are warm and human and make you smile.
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Figure out critical signup metrics for a campaign
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Hiten Shah, Crazy Egg
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Just try things. Start testing. Measure the results
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Jim Calhoun, Popular Media
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Success Stories - Going Viral
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Eric Marcoullier, Todd Sampson, MyBlogLog
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MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo!, is a stats company
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For good example of viral check out http://www.blogebrity.com/
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Try to make virality completely passive. I.e., sign up and you're done.
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Keith Rabois, Slide
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Slide has 22M installations on Facebook
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By comparison, Linkedin ~4000 installation on Facebook. Yelp ~3,000.
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Original business model for viral social networks are almost always wrong, and need to be changed
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Start with the value proposition, not the viral or marketing site
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Signup model is free, but operations and infrastructure is not. Spending a lot on infrastructure.
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Keith never looks at revenue side of investment decision. Cost of customer acquisition is most important metric.
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